No, living under survival pressure is good for mental health. It's what we're evolved to do. Why does it feel good to crack a tough bug, or finish a project, or win a game? It's the same achievement reward a hunter feels bagging a deer.
Some pressure is good but there's a difference between constant pressure and regular sessions of pressure similar to hunting. I don't think we necessarily evolved to be under constant pressure, I'm not saying it's impossible but humans wouldn't thrive under constant pressure, we'd never have had the time to evolve language or the intelect under constant pressure.
With survival pressure, most people die. See that Alone show, most people get at best 2 months done and then thats even before the harsh of the winter really sets in. Just hard to establish enough systems to bring in your daily caloric needs without anyone to help you. You really need the tribe to make survival actually manageable. And in tribal societies all over the world we see how delegating the needs of survival has lead to a lot of other benefits, such as time to iterate on cultural ideas.
Maybe slightly unrelated, but I've done a lot of road trips throughout the US, and there is so much land that is used unproductively, it's really incredible. Land that could be used for energy, food, or housing, just sitting empty or with abandoned structures.
Imagine if we just paid people to coat their properties in solar panels - throw them on your roof, lawn, wherever you have the space. We could drive energy prices down to nothing. We could pay people to install ADUs. The resources are there, but the imagination and commitment are not.
Instead, I'm looking at a $40k+ solar install for my very small house and a breakeven on investment in maybe 10 years for a house I probably won't live in by then.
The land isn't being used because there is no pressing need in the market for more land use. I don't think people realize how much agriculture yields have improved since the 1950s. It is astounding really how much yield we get per acre now mostly from leveraging hybrid species actually, that has been a far bigger improvement to yields than even fertilizer use which is probably what most lay people think is the source of modern yields. In some crops and regions its on the order of 10 fold improvement in yield per acre.
The market is often either wrong or distorted by existing government policies. For some things, subsidies need to be involved to create a new industry where there isn't one. For others, subsidies are a waste of money leading to graft and excess. If I were the one with the credit card, I'd be betting big on hydroponics/vertical farms, medium to high density housing, and high speed rail.
Despite plenty of demand, high density housing still isn't getting built nearly as fast as it should. High building costs, zoning laws, and the ability to just suburban sprawl to infinity mostly prevents this.
Pretty much all vertical farming startups have gone bankrupt. There are endless benefits to vertical farms, but we don't do it because existing farms are cheap in comparison to the necessary investment to make this viable.
We don't build high speed rail because it's a multi-decade long project involving massive logistics, training programs, lots of land rights issues, and the fact that for short to medium distance trips people would probably still prefer to drive since once you get to your target destination, there's still no way to get around without a vehicle.
Payback time in Scotland is 6-ish years. Same seems to be true in Massachusetts. Solar Panels have a lifespan of around 25 years. Inverters may need to be replaced sooner than that, but still last at least a decade.
There is no way that is true unless those solar panels are very subsidized. The energy needed to make a PV is 2x what that panel would harvest over its entire lifetime in Scotland for example. Scotland is a terrible place for PV. The numbers you give are probably accurate for central Mexico though. Also, the mean lifetime of a PV panel is 20 years.
We spend billions every year in gas subsidies. We spend billions every year in food subsidies. For energy independence and the carbon reduction alone, this is a worthwhile investment even if the upfront costs are substantial.
There are other reasons though. Whole house backup is a game changer. Battery always holding about twice our daily usage (or thrice a reduced, emergency usage) means I don’t really care about blackouts or midnight electrical company maintenance power cuts.
Direct to EV DC charging means I don’t buy gas, either. Planning for induction range and heat pump someday too. Not paying for energy about 3/4 of the year feels awesome.
Panels are cheap. Cheap to replace too. The newer ones have even better efficiency. My whole (unsubsidized) sistem cost around $15k here in Eastern Europe and amortization was never a consideration. Money well spent.
Finally, giving the finger to another crappy government-granted monopoly and proving once again that there is no such thing as a “natural” monopoly: priceless.
Approximately 3 times during the course of your life assuming you receive them when you're born and live for 100 years. They're roughly equivalent to wood siding or an asphalt shingle roof.
How long would you say a properly installed panel from 2000 made it in practice? How long would the modern equivalent installed in 2025 be expected to make it? And how many replacement events does each of those make for over the course of your life?
Do you contest my earlier claim that solar is roughly equivalent to wood siding or an asphalt shingle roof?
Using 30 years as a lifetime for solar panels is risky as there are no solar panels running for 30 years, not even close. Never mind the lifetime of the power wall battery and the inverters.
I bought a 40 year "premium" asphalt roof. It barely made it to 20. A regular asphalt roof, perhaps 10 years. Now I have a metal roof.
All the results I've seen indicate that solar panels will keep producing electricity long after those 30 years, just at a reduced rate (but seemingly still >50%).
I'm not sure what kind of answer you expect here. Your initial objection further up was:
> By the time the "free" electricity has paid for the installation, you'll need to replace it.
Since you won't need to replace it, I'd say that this whole thing couldn't work out better: the panels are literally just generating electricity for free! And that's not even taking into account that 30yo panels generate more than "only half the power" (the study I linked measured ~80%).
Imagine someone offered to give you their 30 year old panels and install them on your property for free. Unless every eligible surface is already taken up by more efficient solar panels, who would say no?
I imagine our primitive ancestors in the canopy having near death experiences every day just to get food and shelter. When was the last time you had a near death experience?
Could things be better than they are right now? Probably. But you'll never completely eliminate struggle and pain in this universe, unless you eliminate all life
That's because we didn't built enough housing. And that's solely due to politics and a lot of questionable policies based upon science that the lawmakers often don't understand. There have been housing crises in every type of economic system.
Also, capitalism is the natural state of how humans operate. Money literally predates writing and the first pieces of writing we have are sales invoices.
How different is that from, struggle to build a shelter out of rocks or nasty weather comes and kills you? There are no good things in this universe without some struggle and pain. Sure, maybe in the current decade it's not as easy as it could be, but what do you really expect out of life?
